


The Edge of the Darkness

by Secret Staircase (elwing_alcyone)



Category: Zero: Shisei no Koe | Fatal Frame III: The Tormented
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Post-Game(s), Psychic Abilities, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-11
Updated: 2017-04-11
Packaged: 2018-10-17 16:09:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10597542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elwing_alcyone/pseuds/Secret%20Staircase
Summary: After FF3, Miku, Rei and Kei go on a journey and lay some things to rest.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote most of this back in 2014, right after FF5 came out. I was trying to understand Miku's behaviour in that game, and I also wanted to come up with an explanation for Miu that didn't involve romantic Miku/Mafuyu. Then the guidebook came out and... well. Long story short, I didn't feel like finishing it for a while, but I came back in the end and liked it enough to keep going. No FF5 spoilers, but slightly AU about how Miu was conceived.

Rei and Kei have taken to calling it their quest. They've been on the road for just over a month, and Miku has grown used to nights in hotel rooms, days in the car with maps and scraps of paper spread across the back seat, Kei at the wheel and Rei giving directions. She's grown to like the process of chasing down their list, interviewing locals, digging through old archives in tiny libraries and museums under the bemused eyes of the staff, hunting out increasingly remote and weed-choked cemeteries. They eat in cafés, going over the next day's itinerary. More and more, it weighs on her mind, what they'll do when it's over.

Before bed each night she takes out the list. She has it memorised by now, but she likes the feel of it, the paper creased and soft as well-worn cotton, fragile as cobweb along the folds. She crosses off a name. Now there are only two left.

Rei is saying, "I didn't think it would affect me like that. She was one of the things that always felt more like a nightmare, not a real person. The way she appeared out of nowhere and..." She makes a plunging, thrusting motion with her two fists, driving something invisible out before her. "But it was different hearing her daughter talk about her. And those pictures... the way she looked in the photos, with that little baby."

What Miku remembers are the stories the villagers told her: their night encounters with the old woman as she pushed the stroller along back lanes, crooning her mad, cracked lullabies. She's glad Rei isn't dwelling on that.

"I hope she knows she has more grandchildren now," Kei says, over by the window. He sits forward in the armchair, elbows on his knees, to address Miku. "So, what's next?"

Miku is tracing the softened edges of the paper with her index finger, and doesn't answer until Rei leans forward to touch her wrist. "The mother and daughter," she says.

They left the Kuzuharas late on their list when they were planning, not because they expected any difficulty – on the contrary, they will be among the easiest to find – but because that will bring them closest to the final point on their itinerary, journey's end.

"Myojin Village," Kei says musingly. "In that case we have a long drive tomorrow. I should get some sleep."

After he's gone, Rei gets up to go to the bathroom. Tonight she and Miku are sharing a twin room, and Miku is comforted by the hum of the shower in the en suite, the sounds of Rei moving about, packing and unpacking clothes. She doesn't envy Kei, off by himself.

She looks down at the list again, all the crossed-out names and places. Each one is like a pebble in her palm, a weight of memories. They offered flowers at the waters of Minakami Dam, sought out the graveyards where Kiriko Asanuma and Yoshino Takigawa were (now in spirit as well as name) beside their families, burned incense at the graves of Junsei Takamine, Tomoe Hirasaka and Koji Ogata, tracked down the nameless voices from old, forgotten recordings. The shrine carpenters proved a particular challenge, all from different villages, many unmarried and childless, but they've been diligent. The latest, Junko Suzuki, the woman with the stroller, took the longest; there was no urban legend about her, no name, not even a clear photograph, and the mad grave-robbing of a bereaved old woman is the kind of thing families try to keep out of the newspapers.

Miku lays the list gently aside and begins to arrange the scraps they have gathered on the Kuzuharas. She's come to treasure this feeling, this sifting of papers, this quiet excavation of the corridors of history, inch by inch, word by word, more by feel than sight. She unearths, setting aside the fallen stones to uncover what lies beneath. This must be what her great-grandfather felt, piecing together Himuro Mansion's history from dead pages.

"Miku? Are you okay?" Rei's voice breaks in like light into some dark chamber of thought, and Miku realises her mind was wandering again where it shouldn't. She taps the papers she's holding into a neat stack and tries to smile.

* * *

Myojin Village still exists. The tiny local shrine is well maintained but deserted, the school locked up for the winter holidays. They meet two little girls playing outside a dilapidated storage shed, but when Rei asks whether they know anything about the Kuzuharas, the girls only look at one another and shrug, their mouths pursed.

Kei is saying they might have to drive on to the next town with a library and come back later, but at the edge of the village they pass an old woman clearing wet leaves from her windscreen. The car is rusty and looks as though it hasn't been driven in a long time, and most of the leaves are stuck fast and disintegrate as she tries to peel them back. Kei and Rei get out to help, and when they come back they have good news.

"She says it was her mother who found them missing, can you believe that?" Kei marvels. They turn left up a side-road Miku would not have noticed on her own. "It was seventy years ago, and she was only a little girl at the time, but she remembers her mother being quoted in the newspaper... Apparently the house where they used to live is still standing, just up here."

"Good thing we came in winter," Rei says, as the car rattles and bounces; the road scarcely deserves the name. "With summer growth, you probably wouldn't even know anything was here."

To say the Kuzuhara house is still standing is, in Miku's opinion, too generous. Three sides are just about upright, but two of those are canting dangerously. The interior, dark and dank, is little better than a cave, except that enough of the old raised floor remains to be treacherous. Only a stone marker, weather-beaten and mossy, shows where the gate used to be.

"The old lady said they had their own cemetery plot behind the house," Kei says. "Do you think we'll need the tools to cut through?"

Standing here, Miku can hear the rush of water from somewhere off in the woods. While Rei and Kei are debating the best way to clear a path through the brush, she follows the sound, her boots squelching in mud and leaf mast. She comes out at the lip of a gully, deep and sheer but almost narrow enough to jump over. Far below, a black brook leaps from rock to rock and throws out streamers of white foam, like hair.

She can see the father, inching down the incline, fingers extended towards something bright red; the girl, teetering anxiously on the edge; her scream piercing the day, the redness bursting and blooming and spreading. If you fell here you might get swept a long way, or be caught in one of the deeper pools, trapped underwater by the swiftness of the flow, but she thinks the father of Kozue was dead before he hit the water. She can imagine the two figures wandering through the winter forest on days just like this, calling out the dead man's name.

Miku hates to see these things, hates to see them alone. Still, at every place on the list, she's sought them out, without telling Rei and Kei what she's doing. She gathers the memories like scraps of paper, puts them in order and carries them with her.

She is selfishly relieved to turn her back on the drop. Kei has managed to press through the tangle of undergrowth, much diminished in winter, and they have found the small cluster of Kuzuhara family markers. The work begins. They talk little as they clear away the ivy and leaf litter, straighten the stones that have fallen aslant, scoop brown slop out of the crevices. The markers are too mossy to read, but there are two that refuse to stand straight, and have to be propped against each other. Miku thinks that they might be for Makie and Kozue, who managed to cling to each other even in hell.

The work done, they stand back, their white breath mingling with the incense smoke. Miku tries to blink away the memory of the slip, the fall – a few tears drop loose from her eyelashes instead. It's not the first time she's cried at the gravesides, but this time, Rei reaches out from her right and takes Miku's cold hand in her warm one. When she looks, Rei is watching her, eyes bright with the chill, and something open and intense in her gaze makes Miku tremble. A moment later, Kei takes her other hand on the left, squeezing with a bracing fervour. Between them, Miku has no choice but to be warmed.

* * *

The last part of their quest takes them up to where snow has already fallen. The driving conditions are much worse than the last time Miku came here with Rei, but none of them want to defer this until spring. They pack a larger than usual quantity of emergency supplies, pick a day when the forecast is good, and set out. Kei reminds them all that if peasants in inadequate clothing could reach the Kuze Shrine in winter, surely they can manage it now, in the age of hiking boots and mountain rescue helicopters.

And somewhat to Miku's surprise – she was expecting at least one false start – they do make it, though they have to leave the car and walk the last half-mile, and arrive with aching legs, eyes dazzled by snow-glare. What remains of the Kuze Shrine looks pristine and picturesque in the fresh-fallen snow, against its backdrop of dusted mountain pines. But there's still something here, Miku can sense it. Perhaps places like this never become normal.

There seems no hope of finding a cemetery here, so they go inside, into what used to be the hearth room. Rays of sunlight fall between the broken walls, and occasionally little cascades of snow come tumbling down, sparkling. Still, when Miku closes her eyes, she can see it as it was in her dream, and when she looks again the sunlight seems chill and superficial, a light as brittle as shining glass.

This time it's Rei who goes off on her own. There's nothing for Miku to do here, so she sits on the lowest step of the broken staircase and watches Kei circle the room. In one corner, years of dead leaves are piled up, stiff with frost, and he lifts them aside like handfuls of paper. From his bag he draws something that makes Miku's heart beat faster. The sunlight gleams on the old, scuffed brass of the Camera Obscura, picking out the symbols in brilliant relief, for a moment making it new again. Then Kei places it in the corner and buries it beneath the leaves.

Miku thinks of another broken camera, buried not by leaves but by stones, boulders that must have stamped the brasswork flat and crushed the glass to powder.

"We should see where Rei's got to," she says.

They come out of the ruin and walk a little way, through a kind of meadowland gradually melting back into the forest. Bits of beam and plaster stick out of the earth here and there. They find Rei standing before a great, bare old tree. Miku recognises it as the one that stood at the centre of the courtyard with all the red dolls mounted on stakes. The dolls are all gone, as is the courtyard, but it's as good a place as any to make their offerings and say their prayers to the dead. Just a little way from here, deep underground, perhaps the bones of the tattooed priestesses are lying in their chamber under the earth, where two worlds meet.

"Rei," Miku says, and Rei turns, startled. Miku thinks that for just a moment she forgot anyone else was here.

"I have a..." Rei frowns, groping in her pocket.

"We can leave you alone a bit longer," Kei offers, but Rei is shaking her head.

"I'm glad you're both here." She has to strip off her glove, but finally comes up with what she was looking for. Small and grey, the earring lies in her palm. "I wasn't sure what to do with it. I thought, since the tree's still here... but the ground is too hard."

"Wait a minute." Kei disappears back into the building, and returns a moment later triumphantly brandishing an iron spike. "I remembered seeing this near the fireplace."

He and Rei take it in turns to chisel away at the frozen earth between the tree roots. When they've hacked out a shallow depression, Rei puts the earring into it and sweeps the dirt back over the top of it, and Miku, watching, finally understands.

Rei and Kei have come on this journey to bury what needs to be buried, to let go of the things that can hurt them so they can better carry the things that remain. But Miku has nothing to leave; what hurts her is the emptiness of what has been lost, all evidence of her former life. The loss of her father, her grandmother, her mother, her brother, the house they grew up in, her second sight – even the camera, like a physical manifestation of her family history, their tragedy, saying: this is where we came from. No wonder that while Rei and Kei have been laying their memories to rest, Miku has been off in the dark past the forest's edge, compulsively gathering shadows.

And in understanding this, she understands one more thing: the journey isn't over, not for her. There is one last thing to do.

This time it's Rei who cries, and Miku hesitantly slips an arm around her waist. Rei hugs her close, gropes for Kei on her other side and pulls him in too. For a while they stand like that, before the spirit tree, with their arms around each other, and the sky above: indigo, deepening towards night.

* * *

"I can't believe it's over," Rei says.

They have stopped for dinner in a nicer restaurant than usual. From here, they'll stop at Kei's sister's house to drop him off and collect Ruri, though the last time Kei spoke to her, Mio insisted that she had no intention of giving her up. After that, Rei will have to start looking for assignments right away to make up for her time off, and that means she and Miku will both be busy contacting clients, preparing portfolios and doing background work.

"There's still the book to finish," Kei says, sighing. "Speaking of which, Miku, can I have the notes you made while we both remember?"

"At least they won't need much organising," Rei says, while Miku is digging through her workbag under the table. "She's done everything but write it for you."

Miku passes the folder over, and then, before she can lose her nerve, says, "Actually, I have something to ask you both."

They both stop eating to look at her expectantly, which makes things harder. There's a crack in the table just beside her chopstick rest, and she works her thumbnail along it. "I'd like to go back to Himuro Mansion. Not right away," she hastens to add, when she looks up to see them exchanging frowns. "Maybe in spring. If it's all right."

"Of course, if you want to," Rei says, picking up her chopsticks again. "We'll make sure and arrange it. Don't let me forget!"

Miku's not sure what she expected at her suggestion – melodramatic gasps of horror, recoiling in their seats, maybe – not such matter-of-fact acquiescence. But then, Himuro Mansion doesn't have the same connotations for them as it does for her. For them, it was only a dream.

* * *

It rains, the day in March they set out for Himuro Mansion. All the budding trees are dissolving in a cold mist, and distances are uncertain.

Miku has only vague memories of the mountain approach. She has only been this way twice, after all, and on those occasions she was in no fit state to form detailed impressions of the landscape. So it's a surprise when the road twists and suddenly Himuro Mansion is hulking out of the fog ahead. At first it seems a construction of mist and shadow, larger than life and somehow dreamlike, but as they get closer, she sees the patchy look of the roof where the storms have stripped tiles away. The walls are riddled with cracks, and some of the windows are just empty frames. The whole building has a slumped, diminished look, as if in a generation or two it might become something like the Kuzuhara house, on a grander scale. Somewhere underground, at least, the Malice still rumbles and surges behind the great stone portal, but the house is only a house, slowly becoming a ruin. Miku lets out a long breath.

She feels a light touch on her arm. Rei is watching her, concerned. "Are you all right? Do you want me to come with you?"

She shakes her head, pulls her coat on more tightly and steps away. No words come, so she says nothing. The mist rolls over her, and she is aware that from Rei and Kei's point of view, she is another thing fading, vanishing.

Rather than go inside the mansion, she circles around it, though in places the remains of the gardens have overspilled their bounds and pressed right up against the walls, and at one point she has to wade through an ankle-deep pool that skirts the house, feeling water seep into her boots. She always finds a way through. She follows the sound of water until she comes to the abyss.

The pond has receded from the wall, but here is the waterwheel, frozen on its axis. Here is the gate that once led to the Cherry Atrium: warped and impassable now, but over the wall she can see the cherry tree in bloom. The wind has carried some of its petals out here, and they speckle the bare earth.

Just like before, the water has no visible end, but blurs into the distance, the far shore invisible. Underneath, even now, this water flows through hidden channels, gathers in underground lakes. Miku flows with it, until she feels them.

It is a shock. She thinks some part of her expected to find nothing, as if she might never have had a brother, as if it might all turn out to have been a dream after all. But he is there, some version of him: still, speechless, sightless, stone, and yet aware of her, because she is his sister and some part of him has never stopped listening for her voice. And the one with him, she is aware of everything: she is the crumbling mansion, and the cloudy water, and the cherry tree blooming in the mist, a dream of a memory of life.

There is one thing still she needs, one thing she couldn't find in all her compulsive gathering. She reaches, and because she is alive she is sobbing, and her tears are hot, and the air is cold, and she feels it all, for those who feel nothing.

Something stirs in answer, deep down, some sweet and living freshness that he gives to her.

* * *

"You were gone a while," Rei says. She and Kei are waiting on the bridge, and make no attempt to disguise their relief at seeing her. On the way back to the car, they walk on either side of her, as if to guard against her disappearing again.

"Did you... say goodbye?" Rei asks, and from the hesitant tone, Miku knows there must be something strange about her expression. She only shakes her head, and smiles.

"We didn't say anything."

Maybe she'll always be drawn towards the underworld. She knows places like this will always call to her, and the dead will always be waiting for someone to recognise them, to share their pain. But Mafuyu has given her a gift, and life has given her Rei and Kei, and all this winter, whenever she came too close to the edge of the darkness, they have been there to pull her back into the light.

So she'll try. For as long as she can, she'll try.


End file.
